Developer. Designer. Tea addict.

Symbian

It ‘s been a while since I last blogged. I wish everyone a happy new year 2010 as this happens to be the first post for this year. Lot has happened and importantly, a semester has gone past as I once again got busy doing a bundle of course works.

One of the first things to explore in the new year was gaming engines as I have been looking to create virtual 3D environments. And it became really serious after watching AVATAR, one of the first engines that impressed me was UNITY.

Being a desktop enhancement freak, yesterday after getting bored doing another coursework, thought of trying circle dock inspired by some of the concept videos. An open source version of circle dock from, Sourceforge was the one for me. It was really cool and below shared is a video of it.

However the immediate reason to write this post was QR Code. I knew there is a bar code scanner in ma phone but I have never used it or else I was never required to use it. However, today while I was going through few blogs I found it could be a great way to share urls and even contact details. You can read more on QR Code on, Nokia Mobilecodes. One of ma first attempt was to create a code carrying the blog url. It works tremendously well and I was able to visit the blog soon after scanning it on the phone which earlier I had to either type or to use a bookmark. Below I share the QR Code if you have a phone with bar code scanner you should be able to scan it with the camera.

Anticipating a release of fennac which is the Symbian version of Firefox. Browsing with Firefox on cellphone should be cool. Thank you. 🙂

People come from diverse backgrounds and hence, they have their own interests and preferences when it comes to food, cloths and every other aspect of their life that you might imagine. And it’s quite the same when it comes to choice of softwares as well. People have their own interesting preferences. That’s what we come to know by looking at the number of softwares that are hitting the web every day. Everyday you wake up in the morning, there is some new software waiting for you. So, one can always expect for new applications, doing interesting things or even new application doing the same old thing but in a different way and most importantly they all have their own market place. It’s just amazing and I think it’s great.

And below listed are 7 symbian applications that really made an impact on me. Lonely Coder writes this with the only intent, one or two of these might be of your interest as well. And again I remind you, these are only ma interests based on what I do and what I wish to do. So In case, if you don’t find any of these to quake you, then Lonely Coder would like to apologize you in advance.

1. Rotate Me

This is first out of the lot to be installed on ma phone, still I find really interesting coz it is so sensitive to ma movements.

Generally, in iPhone this comes bundled that’s where it senses the orientation that you holding your iPhone and changes the phones’ display orientation accordingly (motion-sensing orientation of the display). This will only have a 900 switch which means the display will change between portrait and landscape but only in two directions (not in all four directions as could be).

I wanted to have this feature in N95 because there is an in-built accelerometer in N95 as well, that’s where I found RotateMe.

2. Step Count

A Nokia Labs Software again an application of accelerometer. Once you configure it with your height, weight and age. It will start counting the number of steps you walk, the distance covered and the energy burned in the process. So the next you walk make sure you install this app and put it to run in the background.

Later you can use this to analyze your trends, on daily, weekly and monthly basis. Hope you will enjoy your walk with Step Count.

3. Blacklist

Having trouble with nuisance calls? then this is for you. Add all the numbers that you hate and activate it. That’s it, no longer you will calls from the black listed numbers. Unfortunately, it will not prevent messages from those numbers, you will still receive messages. And the most important part of it is that though it doesn’t allow a black listed number to reach you. It will still maintain a log where it will show how many times the poor guy has tried to call you and failed with date and time.

It’s that easy staying away from all unwanted calls with BlackList.

4. World Mate

Are you into traveling? Have you ever wanted to check check your flight schedule on right on your mobile? Yes you can all all that with piece of software. More over it can give you scheduled whether reports depending on your location which it will read out for you, and also currency conversion. All this requires a GPRS connection and it’s enough to update it once a day. Which is not gonna cost you a big some of money either. It really has it’s worth if you are a traveler.

But, In order to access some of its services you must sign-up for a premium account.

5. Calcium

This I like purely because of it’s usability over the in-built calculator that comes with nokia smart phones as most others do. The biggest problem with the default calculator beside all its capabilities is that the time it takes for you to perform a sum and most importantly, the number of keys that you have to press in the process.

For an instance if you are to perform,
7*4+2

with the default calculator you will have to make ten clicks

With the simple navigator based Calcium calculator it only takes you 6 clicks

I think this would give you a better idea as to why one should prefer Calcium over the default calculator. Assume you are out shopping, which one do you think will be the handiest? It is Calcium. I’ll give 100% for both its usability and simplicity.
Yes; Simple things should be made simple.

6. X-plore

If you are primarily a computer user no-doubt you will be on the look out for a replacement for Windows Explorer if you are having a windows box or else if you are a UNIX user you will lookout for a replacement of Nautilus in your phone.

That’s where X-plore can be handy for you. It’s an state-of-the-art file explorer for your phone. I don’t think I’ll even be able to list out all it’s capabilities purely because it can do a lot of things for you. X-plore, can almost give you the feel of a computer right in your phone.

7. Screen Shot

Last out of ma selection but never means the least. I think you have already seen it in action. Since, all of the above screen shots are taken via Screen Shot. You can set up a button or a combination of buttons to use it. Once, you activate Screen Shot you can start taking your screen shots by pressing the button(s) that you have configured.